Bread and Circuses

11 Pentecost Cycle B, Proper 13 August 4, 2024
Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15 Psalm 78:23-29

Ephesians 4:1-16 John 6:24-35

Lectionary Link

One often can be amazed at the lack of wisdom of wealthy, powerful, and greedy people vis a vis the peasants and poor masses.

Economic insight would indicate that if the masses were all paid enough so they could be comfortable, and have enough money to have enough food and entertainment then they would never be in the mood to revolt against those who were wealthy, powerful, and greedy.  It is amazing to see the oligarchical class act for their own luxurious situation while taking away from the working class which provides the labor basis for their very style of living.

The Roman satirist Juvenal writing around the year 100 was decrying the situation of the atrophying of the enlightened participation of people in governance.  He wrote, "Give the people bread and circuses, and they will not revolt."

If people have enough to eat, enough sports, cinema, television, games, dance, music, and arts of every sort, then they are likely to be pacified within their political situation.

Give the people bread and circuses....this was written around the same time for the dates  given for the Gospel of John coming to textual forms.

The Gospel of John, unlike the synoptic Gospels does not have the famous parables of Jesus; rather the Gospel of John is constructed around signs followed by expansive discourses.  I would suggest that these discourses are about coming to an enlightened use of language.  The literary presentation of the signs of Jesus are a triggering mechanisms for one to experience a different aspect perception, as illustrated in the well-known picture of the duck or rabbit.  An interior switch within oneself allows one to see a rabbit in seeing in one aspect perception, and a goat in another aspect perception.

Just like the duck and rabbit are both present in the picture, it is the perceptual interior switch that opens up what one confesses one is seeing.  The duck/rabbit dichotomy in the Gospel of John is the natural/spiritual dichotomy.

In the multiplication of loaves story which resides within the tradition of Moses and the Manna in the wilderness story tradition, what comes to the fore again is the ancient insight, "humanity does not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God."

In John's Gospel the creating word which proceeds from God is Christ, the eternal Word.  Before we know and access the physical and outer world, it is pre-constituted by the fact that we as human beings have language which is the valuing and sorting system of life for everything.

Word or language as our sorting or valuing system creates the very meaning of our human experience.  The Gospel of John written within a group of followers of Christ six to seven decades after Jesus, was writing the value system of their movement which they believed derived from Jesus of Nazareth.

The words of Jesus relayed in the bread of life discourse in John, impart a similar nuance as the words of Juvenal about Bread and Circuses.

The words of Jesus are words to wean us from the mere physical, or the addiction to the physical.  A baby eventually is to be weaned from only breast milk and the constant entertainment of contact with the maternal body or surrogate substitutes.  The result of being weaned from exclusive breast milk and exclusive maternal body is to grow into the fullness of a worded life and within the life of language the telling presence of many kinds of sustenances come to be known as well as the generalization of the delight of the maternal body to many other kinds of presences.

The writers of the Gospel of John were also those who lived within a practicing Eucharistic community.  The spiritual significance of the Eucharist was the practice of a spiritual aspect perception.  No, the bread is not literal flesh and blood of Jesus in a crass cannibal perception; no the partaking is not in bread alone but in the Word, Christ the Eternal Word, who proceeds from the eternal creating God and is renewed in the Eucharistic event.

Let us not reduce Eucharist or Christian liturgy to the mere aspect perception of bread and entertainment; let us enter into the aspect perception of participation with the Eternal Word which always already proceeds from that which none greater can be conceived.  And let us be delivered from the physical world as like the limitation of a babe to breast milk and the maternal body and let us be enlightened to know how diffuse the Word as God helps us to know endless spiritual presence.  Amen.